Apr 06, 2024NewsroomSkimmer / Threat Intelligence

Threat actors have been found exploiting a critical flaw in Magento to inject a persistent backdoor into e-commerce websites.

The attack leverages CVE-2024-20720 (CVSS score: 9.1), which has been described by Adobe as a case of “improper neutralization of special elements” that could pave the way for arbitrary code execution.

It was addressed by the company as part of security updates released on February 13, 2024.

Sansec said it discovered a “cleverly crafted layout template in the database” that’s being used to automatically inject malicious code to execute arbitrary commands.

“Attackers combine the Magento layout parser with the beberlei/assert package (installed by default) to execute system commands,” the company said.

“Because the layout block is tied to the checkout cart, this command is executed whenever <store>/checkout/cart is requested.”

The command in question is sed, which is used to insert a code execution backdoor that’s then responsible for delivering a Stripe payment skimmer to capture and exfiltrate financial information to another compromised Magento store.

The development comes as the Russian government has charged six people for using skimmer malware to steal credit card and payment information from foreign e-commerce stores at least since late 2017.

The suspects are Denis Priymachenko, Alexander Aseyev, Alexander Basov, Dmitry Kolpakov, Vladislav Patyuk, and Anton Tolmachev. Recorded Future News reported that the arrests were made a year ago, citing court documents.

“As a result, members of the hacker group illegally took possession of information about almost 160 thousand payment cards of foreign citizens, after which they sold them through shadow internet sites,” the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation said.

A suspected Vietnamese-origin threat actor has been observed targeting victims in several Asian and Southeast Asian countries with malware designed to harvest valuable data since at least May 2023.

Cisco Talos is tracking the cluster under the name CoralRaider, describing it as financially motivated. Targets of the campaign include India, China, South Korea, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

“This group focuses on stealing victims’ credentials, financial data, and social media accounts, including business and advertisement accounts,” security researchers Chetan Raghuprasad and Joey Chen said. “They use RotBot, a customized variant of Quasar RAT, and XClient stealer as payloads.”

Other commodity malware used by the group comprises a combination of remote access trojans and information stealers such as AsyncRAT, NetSupport RAT, and Rhadamanthys.

The targeting of business and advertisement accounts has been of particular focus for attackers operating out of Vietnam, with various stealer malware families like Ducktail, NodeStealer, and VietCredCare deployed to take control of the accounts for further monetization.

The modus operandi entails the use of Telegram to exfiltrate the stolen information from victim machines, which is then traded in underground markets to generate illicit revenues.

“CoralRaider operators are based in Vietnam, based on the actor messages in their Telegram C2 bot channels and language preference in naming their bots, PDB strings, and other Vietnamese words hard-coded in their payload binaries,” the researchers said.

Attack chains start with a Windows shortcut file (LNK), although there is currently no clear explanation as to how these files are distributed to the targets.

Should the LNK file be opened, an HTML application (HTA) file is downloaded and executed from an attacker-controlled download server, which, in turn, runs an embedded Visual Basic script.

The script, for its part, decrypts and sequentially executes three other PowerShell scripts that are responsible for performing anti-VM and anti-analysis checks, circumventing Windows User Access Control (UAC), disabling Windows and application notifications, and downloading and running RotBot.

RotBot is configured to contact a Telegram bot and retrieve the XClient stealer malware and execute it in memory, ultimately facilitating the theft of cookies, credentials, and financial information from web browsers like Brave, Cốc Cốc, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera; Discord and Telegram data; and screenshots.

XClient is also engineered to siphon data from victims’ Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube accounts, gathering details about the payment methods and permissions associated with their Facebook business and ads accounts.

“RotBot is a variant of the Quasar RAT client that the threat actor has customized and compiled for this campaign,” the researchers said. “[XClient] has extensive information-stealing capability through its plugin module and various modules for performing remote administrative tasks.”

The development comes as Bitdefender disclosed details of a malvertising campaign on Facebook that’s taking advantage of the buzz surrounding generative AI tools to push an assortment of information stealers like Rilide, Vidar, IceRAT, and a new entrant known as Nova Stealer.

The starting point of the attack is the threat actor taking over an existing Facebook account and modifying its appearance to mimic well-known AI tools from Google, OpenAI, and Midjourney, and expanding their reach by running sponsored ads on the platform.

One is imposter page masquerading as Midjourney had 1.2 million followers before it was taken down on March 8, 2023. The threat actors managing the page were mainly from Vietnam, the U.S., Indonesia, the U.K., and Australia, among others.

“The malvertising campaigns have tremendous reach through Meta’s sponsored ad system and have actively been targeting European users from Germany, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, and elsewhere,” the Romanian cybersecurity company said.

Mar 21, 2024NewsroomThreat Intelligence / Vulnerability

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a tool referred to as AndroxGh0st that’s used to target Laravel applications and steal sensitive data.

“It works by scanning and taking out important information from .env files, revealing login details linked to AWS and Twilio,” Juniper Threat Labs researcher Kashinath T Pattan said.

“Classified as an SMTP cracker, it exploits SMTP using various strategies such as credential exploitation, web shell deployment, and vulnerability scanning.”

AndroxGh0st has been detected in the wild since at least 2022, with threat actors leveraging it to access Laravel environment files and steal credentials for various cloud-based applications like Amazon Web Services (AWS), SendGrid, and Twilio.

Attack chains involving the Python malware are known to exploit known security flaws in Apache HTTP Server, Laravel Framework, and PHPUnit to gain initial access and for privilege escalation and persistence.

Earlier this January, U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies warned of attackers deploying the AndroxGh0st malware to create a botnet for “victim identification and exploitation in target networks.”

“Androxgh0st first gains entry through a weakness in Apache, identified as CVE-2021-41773, allowing it to access vulnerable systems,” Pattan explained.

“Following this, it exploits additional vulnerabilities, specifically CVE-2017-9841 and CVE-2018-15133, to execute code and establish persistent control, essentially taking over the targeted systems.”

Androxgh0st is designed to exfiltrate sensitive data from various sources, including .env files, databases, and cloud credentials. This allows threat actors to deliver additional payloads to compromised systems.

Juniper Threat Labs said it has observed an uptick in activity related to the exploitation of CVE-2017-9841, making it essential that users move quickly to update their instances to the latest version.

A majority of the attack attempts targeting its honeypot infrastructure originated from the U.S., U.K., China, the Netherlands, Germany, Bulgaria, Kuwait, Russia, Estonia, and India, it added.

The development comes as the AhnLab Security Intelligence Center (ASEC) revealed that vulnerable WebLogic servers located in South Korea are being targeted by adversaries and used them as download servers to distribute a cryptocurrency miner called z0Miner and other tools like fast reverse proxy (FRP).

It also follows the discovery of a malicious campaign that infiltrates AWS instances to create over 6,000 EC2 instances within minutes and deploy a binary associated with a decentralized content delivery network (CDN) known as Meson Network.

The Singapore-based company, which aims to create the “world’s largest bandwidth marketplace,” works by allowing users to exchange their idle bandwidth and storage resources with Meson for tokens (i.e., rewards).

“This means miners will receive Meson tokens as a reward for providing servers to the Meson Network platform, and the reward will be calculated based on the amount of bandwidth and storage brought into the network,” Sysdig said in a technical report published this month.

“It isn’t all about mining cryptocurrency anymore. Services like Meson network want to leverage hard drive space and network bandwidth instead of CPU. While Meson may be a legitimate service, this shows that attackers are always on the lookout for new ways to make money.”

With cloud environments increasingly becoming a lucrative target for threat actors, it is critical to keep software up to date and monitor for suspicious activity.

Threat intelligence firm Permiso has also released a tool called CloudGrappler, that’s built on top of the foundations of cloudgrep and scans AWS and Azure for flagging malicious events related to well-known threat actors.

Feb 06, 2024NewsroomSocial Engineering / Malvertising

Threat actors are leveraging bogus Facebook job advertisements as a lure to trick prospective targets into installing a new Windows-based stealer malware codenamed Ov3r_Stealer.

“This malware is designed to steal credentials and crypto wallets and send those to a Telegram channel that the threat actor monitors,” Trustwave SpiderLabs said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

Ov3r_Stealer is capable of siphoning IP address-based location, hardware info, passwords, cookies, credit card information, auto-fills, browser extensions, crypto wallets, Microsoft Office documents, and a list of antivirus products installed on the compromised host.

While the exact end goal of the campaign is unknown, it’s likely that the stolen information is offered for sale to other threat actors. Another possibility is that Ov3r_Stealer could be updated over time to act as a QakBot-like loader for additional payloads, including ransomware.

The starting point of the attack is a weaponized PDF file that purports to be a file hosted on OneDrive, urging users to click on an “Access Document” button embedded into it.

Trustwave said it identified the PDF file being shared on a fake Facebook account impersonating Amazon CEO Andy Jassy as well as via Facebook ads for digital advertising jobs.

Users who end up clicking on the button are served an internet shortcut (.URL) file that masquerades as a DocuSign document hosted on Discord’s content delivery network (CDN). The shortcut file then acts as a conduit to deliver a control panel item (.CPL) file, which is then executed using the Windows Control Panel process binary (“control.exe“).

The execution of the CPL file leads to the retrieval of a PowerShell loader (“DATA1.txt”) from a GitHub repository to ultimately launch Ov3r_Stealer.

It’s worth noting at this stage that a near-identical infection chain was recently disclosed by Trend Micro as having put to use by threat actors to drop another stealer called Phemedrone Stealer by exploiting the Microsoft Windows Defender SmartScreen bypass flaw (CVE-2023-36025, CVSS score: 8.8).

The similarities extend to the GitHub repository used (nateeintanan2527) and the fact that Ov3r_Stealer shares code-level overlaps with Phemedrone.

“This malware has recently been reported, and it may be that Phemedrone was re-purposed and renamed to Ov3r_Stealer,” Trustwave said. “The main difference between the two is that Phemedrone is written in C#.”

The findings come as Hudson Rock revealed that threat actors are advertising their access to law enforcement request portals of major organizations like Binance, Google, Meta, and TikTok by exploiting credentials obtained from infostealer infections.

They also follow the emergence of a category of infections called CrackedCantil that take leverage cracked software as an initial access vector to drop loaders like PrivateLoader and SmokeLoader, when subsequently act as a delivery mechanism for information stealers, crypto miners, proxy botnets, and ransomware.

Feb 06, 2024NewsroomDark Web / Cybercrime

Employment agencies and retail companies chiefly located in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region have been targeted by a previously undocumented threat actor known as ResumeLooters since early 2023 with the goal of stealing sensitive data.

Singapore-headquartered Group-IB said the hacking crew’s activities are geared towards job search platforms and the theft of resumes, with as many as 65 websites compromised between November 2023 and December 2023.

The stolen files are estimated to contain 2,188,444 user data records, of which 510,259 have been taken from job search websites. Over two million unique email addresses are present within the dataset.

“By using SQL injection attacks against websites, the threat actor attempts to steal user databases that may include names, phone numbers, emails, and DoBs, as well as information about job seekers’ experience, employment history, and other sensitive personal data,” security researcher Nikita Rostovcev said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

“The stolen data is then put up for sale by the threat actor in Telegram channels.”

Group-IB said it also uncovered evidence of cross-site scripting (XSS) infections on at least four legitimate job search websites that are designed to load malicious scripts responsible for displaying phishing pages capable of harvesting administrator credentials.

ResumeLooters is the second group after GambleForce that has been found staging SQL injection attacks in the APAC region since late December 2023.

A majority of the compromised websites are based in India, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Australia, and Turkey, although compromises have also been reported from Brazil, the U.S., Turkey, Russia, Mexico, and Italy.

The modus operandi of ResumeLooters involves the use of the open-source sqlmap tool to carry out SQL injection attacks and drop and execute additional payloads such as the BeEF (short for Browser Exploitation Framework) penetration testing tool and rogue JavaScript code designed to gather sensitive data and redirect users to credential harvesting pages.

The cybersecurity company’s analysis of the threat actor’s infrastructure reveals the presence of other tools like Metasploit, dirsearch, and xray, alongside a folder hosting the pilfered data.

The campaign appears to be financially motivated, given the fact that ResumeLooters have set up two Telegram channels named 渗透数据中心 and 万国数据阿力 last year to sell the information.

“ResumeLooters is yet another example of how much damage can be made with just a handful of publicly available tools,” Rostovcev said. “These attacks are fueled by poor security as well as inadequate database and website management practices.”

“It is striking to see how some of the oldest yet remarkably effective SQL attacks remain prevalent in the region. However, the tenacity of the ResumeLooters group stands out as they experiment with diverse methods of exploiting vulnerabilities, including XSS attacks.”